


tokyo's aging population problem and why we'll never be able to solve it

by perennials



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 08:15:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19988953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: The truth is when Ryouta sayshey, we went to the same high school didn’t we,he’s thinking about taking him home and eating his heart, not salvation.Or: getting hurt by pretty boys with self-destructive tendencies since 2007.





	tokyo's aging population problem and why we'll never be able to solve it

**Author's Note:**

> cw: animal abuse mention, cigarettes, existentialism

Maybe in another world Kuroko can see ghosts. He does not shout this fact from the rooftops the way teenagers like to do with all the insecurities they have misconstrued for philosophical truths, but he establishes himself as part of the school’s unimpressive collection of legends anyway, alongside the one about the spinning metal bust of their founder and the plastic skeleton that shoots hoops in the third gymnasium after midnight. Naturally, when Ryouta meets him for the first time in one of the less-used hallways behind the classroom block, he asks Kuroko if he can really see ghosts. Yes, there is one standing right behind you, Kuroko tells him while carefully pushing a straw into a packet of soy milk. Will it kill me, Ryouta asks. He feels excited and pleased and sick. No, Kuroko says and disappears down the staircase before he can ask Kuroko to try and kill him, and Ryouta doesn’t hear from him again until a year later when he is caught trying to feed a ziplock bag full of apple seeds to the rabbits the first years take turns looking after behind the garden. The school returns his legacy and his indoor shoes to him in the mail but forgets to give him back his dignity. Kagami tells Ryouta about all of this over lunch, and Ryouta nods and looks shocked at the appropriate times, but all he can think about is the final exams Kuroko didn’t get to sit for. Someone else will score the highest in their year for literature this time.

After dropping out of high school, Kuroko ends up working part-time at Family Mart on Sundays and Thursdays and is never caught trying to feed any rabbits the contents of an opaque ziplock bag ever again. He develops a smoking habit at twenty and by twenty-two, everything in his apartment smells permanently of stale cigarettes. Ryouta wrinkles his nose and asks about the contents of his fridge when he visits but Kuroko only stares at him from the kitchen, legs crossed against the cabinets. He doesn’t care about the ash on Kuroko’s countertop but can he smoke on the balcony for tonight and does he have at least one carb-free option in the cupboard which Ryouta has not checked and therefore assumes contains food. If not, Ryouta will have to make a trip down to the convenience store later alone. Also, he hopes Kuroko’s closet is free of skeletons tonight because Ryouta wants to sleep in it.

You cannot sleep in my closet, Kuroko informs him. They share Kuroko’s bed again that night, a respectable three inches left between their backs that only remains for as long as both of them are awake. In the morning Ryouta has a bruise on his cheekbone and Kuroko has escaped to the balcony for a smoke. Remind me why I come here again, Ryouta says. Kuroko shrugs. Because you have nowhere else to go.

He’s not wrong. Ryouta is a model with a contract from a blitzy, well-funded agency that wants to exploit him, but he’s smart with his words and stingy when it comes to the truth and as a result, manages to avoid getting his pretty face scarred as frequently as his contemporaries. He’s majoring in economics at a university near his apartment and, having given up on the ones in the morning, attends at least forty-three percent of his afternoon lectures. His parents wanted him to go to college before he ruined his life by becoming a model and he was not yet ready to let them down. He thinks he will be ready to let them down when he gets his bachelor’s degree and leaves for California. There, he will overcome the effects of systemic discrimination with his talk-show personality and beautiful blond hair and be hailed as the stunning Japanese boy who ended racism. The girls will be blonder than him and louder and have fake nails that leave red crescent moons in his skin, and none of them will look like a high school kid with blue hair who claims he can see ghosts. They will kiss with teeth.

“You’re in love with him.” And then, “didn’t he try to kill those rabbits?” Aomine frowns, struggling to accept some false reality that he has constructed for himself in his head.

“You have constructed a false reality for yourself in your head in which I am in love with Kuroko,” Ryouta tells him seriously. “I’m not. Sorry for your loss.”

“God, I remember the days when all you did was flirt with people and look sad. What happened to you, Kise.”

Ryouta smiles at him over the top of the script for his latest assignment. It is a television commercial for shampoo. He is playing the role of an unnaturally attractive man in his thirties who is insecure about his photoshopped hair because it was photoshopped and no longer fits his unnaturally attractive image. There will be a soundtrack composed by a musician who has composed music for several popular erotic games. His evil exploitative manager has high hopes for him.

“He smokes ten cigarettes a day, Aomine. I have a reputation to maintain.” Aomine rolls his eyes. In the evening Ryouta delivers pocari sweat to Kuroko’s empty fridge and resists the urge to walk into the wrong room.

::

“I want to touch him, but if I touch him I’ll hurt him.”

“Kise, I am not your personal therapist. Neither am I Kuroko’s, although I think you may have some misconceptions regarding that as well.”

“Everyone said he was a spiritualist in high school, you remember that right? It was all over the place. The press team even ran an article about him once. It was on the third page of their monthly publication. They couldn’t find a good photo of him for the feature, so all we got to see was his shoulder.”

“He has never asked me about poltergeists either, and if he has had any traumatic experiences with them then he has hidden the side effects of those encounters well. I doubt it is an area of concern.”

“I thought you’d know more about him, Akashi, you were there for his eighth birthday party weren’t you. I bet he looked cute as an eight year old. Real fucking sweet. Bet he ordered chocolate cake and only the kids whose parents felt sorry for him turned up.”

“He did not have a birthday party for his eighth birthday. He never hosted any birthday parties.”

“Huh, should have seen that coming. Does he like rabbits?”

“Kise, shut the fuck up.”

::

He doesn’t really remember turning twenty-five but according to everyone he keeps in touch with, it does happen. His parents are pleased about his college degree and disappointed that he wants to ruin his life by being a model forever, but they don’t tell him that and consequently their relationship remains as healthily dysfunctional as it has always been. Trump gets elected in America, so he changes his mind about going to Hollywood. He moves into a nicer Roppongi apartment.

Within a one month radius of his birthday, one month being the internationally-recognized maximum duration of Aomine’s memory, he finds an awkwardly-wrapped basketball on his doorstep. Meanwhile Akashi books him an appointment with his expensive family psychiatrist, which he offers to Kuroko who now works the midnight shifts at a Lawson near his place. Kuroko tells him he thinks Ryouta is too old to require parental supervision when he wants to leave the house, and makes him pay for his jello instead of treating him like he usually does.

Ryouta waits for him to finish his shift outside. The sky is a smooth, unbroken swathe of blue except for where the clouds have split apart to let the greedy hands of heaven through. There, the light is white and gold and hurts his eyes to look at. He squints through the gaps between his fingers at the sun and wonders why it bothers breaking its back for such a horribly subpar species every morning, over and over again, and still asks for nothing. Selfless bitch. Ryouta could do with a crash course on managing his expectations and being a selfless bitch himself.

Kuroko changes into loose jeans and a hoodie after his shift ends and announces his arrival by jabbing his heel into Ryouta’s Doc Martens. His eyes are red from staying up all night, illuminated by the evil white light from the rising sun. “Merry Christmas.”

“You’re ten days late! I’m flattered.”

“Brought you a gift.” Kuroko hands him a fistful of Tirol chocolates. Ryouta pockets them. They don’t talk for a while.

“Hey, Kuroko, why’d you do it?”

Kuroko looks at him blankly. “I thought you liked sweet things.”

“Not that,” Ryouta laughs, although he has a few words to say about the chocolates too. “I meant the rabbits.”

“I see one of us is still living in the past.”

Ryouta refuses to drop his eyes. He is too old to be shaken by abrupt turns in conversation and underhanded escape tactics that take advantage of the weakness in one’s heart. Besides which, he doesn’t have much of a heart left anyway, and is therefore immune. Tax evasion may be a rite of passage to adulthood. Getting your feelings hurt by a pretty boy with self-destructive tendencies certainly is not. “Why’d you do it?” he repeats.

“The ghosts,” Kuroko says tiredly, stubbing his cigarette out on the ground. He hasn’t changed much since their first year of high school. Perhaps he would have grown taller if he had gone to college and joined the basketball team and started a revolution whereby he taught all of them how to misconstrue their teenage insecurities for philosophical truths, but he did not, and in distancing himself from that dream the world had suffered a loss of some sort. Whether it was a major one or not, Ryouta does not know. They had not been close enough in high school for him to make snap judgments about where Kuroko was going and how he planned on getting there.

“Maybe things would have been different if Kagami had come back from America earlier,” Kuroko adds as an afterthought. Ryouta closes his fist around the plastic wrappers in his pocket, bites his lip until it bleeds.

::

When he was thirteen, he took one of those online personality tests that had been based off of credible academic research and then stripped of all credibility so as to appeal to the greater public, who only wanted easy answers to questions with no real solutions. It told him he was self-centered and selfish and possessed a chronic lying problem. His future partner would have to be someone generous and understanding if he wanted any chance at winning the one in infinity lottery of happiness. Later on in life he realized that everyone needed someone generous and understanding because everyone was fucked up in one way or another and two fucked up people would only hurt each other. Additionally, he would not find a partner of such self-sacrificial caliber by pure merit of his attractiveness or sharp tongue. This was disappointing to him. He had been packing all of his feelings inside tiny metal safes and hurling them into the metaphysical ocean of forbidden truths by telling himself that he was saving his tender inexperienced heart for the one person who really deserved him. It turned out he was not deserving of anyone. People who are generous and understanding are usually the first to be taken advantage of. There is a reason all the adults who have made it to adulthood have done so through selfish means.

He never does get any better at cooking. Kagami stays in Tokyo for college and teaches him how to make the bare minimum for living like rice and miso soup, but Ryouta is horribly busy exploiting his evil exploitative model agency, which has expanded to become an acting agency too, and his apartments keep getting bigger and emptier and quieter. Dust gathers on the kitchen counter. Why should I spend thirty minutes chopping bean sprouts when I can buy a salad for three hundred yen at the Family Mart Kuroko doesn’t work at downstairs? Ryouta tears into the plastic surrounding his condiment-free multigrain ham-and-lettuce sandwich. Not everyone has three hundred yen to spend on salad, Kagami growls. That’s fair, he says noncommittally. He has never been just anyone. This is of no concern to him.

When Kuroko gets bored of working at every convenience store chain in the city, he goes back to school. His smoking habit has been compensated for by his lack of interest in virtually anything else in the material world. Night school is only a problem because he hates traveling. After a few months he finally gets to sit for the high school exams he could not sit for because of the rabbits, and passes them, and in the spring when Ryouta picks up his first modeling gig of the year out of a misguided sense of duty towards his parents who for the record have given up on their permanently ruined son, Kuroko starts college. He moves into Ryouta’s apartment on the basis of convenience. Frankly it does little to alleviate the horrible way the empty space destroys Ryouta’s mental health like a large, Frankenstein-like monster with a bowling pin and bad cologne, but he doesn’t comment on this, either. If Kuroko is a ghost, at least he drinks miso soup with both hands.

Ryouta’s cooking never gets any better and he never gets over his habit of buying sugar-free Kirin lemon, but Kuroko doesn’t give a shit about anything except for his books and his cigarettes anyway so he doesn’t complain and Ryouta never asks. Ryouta is guilty and grateful in equal measures. On some level he registers that Kuroko would raise the issue over unseasoned bean sprouts and rice at his expensive designer dining table if he considered it an issue. Lying requires effort, which Kuroko dislikes giving out. On some other level where his pining horny teenage self still resides, he wonders if maybe Kuroko deserves better.

“Not really, no,” Kuroko says, and Ryouta realizes he’s spoken out loud. “I think it would help if you used more salt.” Ryouta does that. He hasn’t eaten the Tirol chocolates he gave him yet, but he’s not particularly worried. Mass-produced sweets have a shelf life of several years.

::

One time in high school he thought maybe he wanted to play basketball. It was a fleeting thought in the months leading up to graduation, two years after Kuroko had joined and quit and everyone had forgotten about the fact. Kagami had returned from America at the start of their last year, strong and clumsy and attractive in a way that made you want to eat his cooking and his face, but he had arrived on the scene too late to really change anything about the internal or external line-up of the school’s basketball team. High school was not all about club activities, after all. Universities cared more about the number of exam papers you could complete in an hour while balancing three plates on your head and simultaneously reciting the works of Dazai Osamu. They did not see how much Kuroko had tried to make himself seen on a court full of normal people, and then given up.

Anyway, Kagami and Ryouta became good friends in that last year because Ryouta was good at running the way he was at everything and Kagami was one of the scant few who could keep up. Neither of them had many friends in school. Ryouta had admirers, but there was a fairly thick line between slightly-obsessive fanclub members and friends he could go to when he was trapped at a convenience store with an empty wallet. Kagami was one of the latter. Ryouta missed classes regularly because his evil exploitative agency wanted to train him to become an evil exploitative supermodel and he thought that sounded fun. Whenever he did show up in school, condensation from his sugar-free Kirin lemon seeping into the fabric of his backpack, Kagami would appear with packet tissues and photocopied sets of his notes, neatly stapled and frequently shuffled out of order. Ryouta always told him he could just send him photos of what he had written, but Kagami insisted that Ryouta would not read them if he did not print them out. He was right.

“That’s probably Kuroko Tetsuya,” Kagami told him in the middle of March when he mentioned the eerie flash of blue he had seen on the staircase behind the hall, because he was a nice polite young man raised by good parents who remembered the names and faces of everyone he had ever spoken to. Kuroko Tetsuya had been part of the basketball team for a few weeks. Also, he was the spiritualist in that one rumor about the kid who could see ghosts and now Ryouta was morally obligated to go find him again.

“Speaking of basketball.” Ryouta rolled over onto his stomach. The rooftop was pleasantly breezy and devoid of students. Kagami had opened up his four-layered bento and begun to pick at his karaage. “Have you heard of the Miracles?”

“What’s that? Sounds gross.”

“They’re a bunch of really strong basketball players, I think. Same age as us and everything.”

“Don’t know shit about them.”

“People say they could have been great if they all got onto the same team, but that never happened. Now only basketball nerds know about them.”

Kagami moved on to his pickled vegetables, which sat on the second level of his bento beside the fried fish cake and tamagoyaki. “You’re not a nerd.”

Ryouta shrugged. “I was interested in basketball for a while.”

Maybe in another world he would have gone to a particular middle school with a particularly strong basketball team and Aomine Daiki would have hurled a basketball at the back of his head, killing him instantly. This would have triggered a more ominous, intense love of basketball that was therefore also more fruitful. He would have fallen in love with him, and Aomine would embark on a long tedious journey to stop using basketball as a proxy for his feelings, eventually culminating in an international car chase that ended on the coasts of Argentina. Ryouta would not be given the time to develop an unhealthy addiction to low-sugar jelly.

In this world Ryouta learned to exploit people too soon. Kagami became his closest friend because he was the second most similar person to him aside from Aomine, who he would not meet until college where Aomine would try half-heartedly to earn a degree in sports medicine, permanently ruin his body, and then drop out. Ryouta was never any good at sticking to routines, and even in the years after high school they only stayed in touch because Kagami frequently baked using recipes he had found off cooking channels on Youtube and was incapable of estimating portion sizes. None of them ever forgot about the rabbits.

::

Ryouta is no stranger to wants, but no one is deserving of anything and he finds open communication and honesty rather embarrassing. Emotional vulnerability horrifies him. He could, if asked, write an entire essay about a very specific aspect of Kuroko who sleeps in the room next door these days and goes to seventy-two percent of his morning and afternoon lectures— his flat blue eyes, his brittle bird hands, or perhaps more abstractly, his quiet unsettling mind and the three inches of floral wallpaper behind his eyes. He would have to save the words ‘gentle’ and ‘soft’ only for when he really felt he needed them, as unintentional repetition in any text only makes it seem draggy and many aspects of Kuroko Tetsuya warrant such vocabulary.

For practical purposes, Ryouta does not employ astronomy-related metaphors in his daily life. It tires him out to have feelings. He would rather drink coffee for the rest of his life.

::

“Can you still see ghosts?” Ryouta asks him one evening. He has just finished his jog. Kuroko is on his fourth cigarette of the day.

“Yes. There is one standing right behind you,” Kuroko replies, staring at his shoes, and it makes Ryouta feel a little nostalgic.

“Tell me more about it.”

“It is the ghost of a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old. He looks very sad and regretful and seems to be shouting something at you but you cannot hear him, so that is making him sadder. He is holding a basketball. It looks old.”

Ryouta sits down beside him, a respectable three inches of chair between them. “What’s he saying?”

“I do not know. The dead do not speak.”

“Are you fucking with me right now?”

“Maybe.” Another cigarette.

::

This is the part of the story where Ryouta is supposed to recall a specific and vivid memory from his past in which he and Kuroko had a wonderful fated encounter and one or the other tripped by the roadside and fell into a painful, one-sided love. That is how all Hollywood romances go. A forgotten encounter from the protagonists’ childhoods that resurfaces towards the end of the movie, a tearful confession with a piano soundtrack composed by a famous composer from Manhattan New York, systemic racism. The audience bawls their eyes out in the dark empty theater and opens Google chrome later on that day so they can give it a five star review on IMDB and it makes more money than most people will see in their lifetime. But they only talked to each other once in high school.

Maybe in another world Kuroko can see ghosts. He sees so many ghosts that he loses his grasp on reality and falls into the depths of depression and Ryouta never bumps into him in the hallway behind the classroom block. Maybe in another world he goes to Teikou. Akashi Seijurou is not his childhood friend but the captain of their middle school basketball team and he has grand, adrenalin-charged ideas about how to make Kuroko shine on a court full of monsters. That basketball team rises to so much fame that they are talked about by people who are not basketball nerds or reading about them out of sheer boredom. They become gods in people-skin. Subsequently their monstrous inhuman power destroys them, and in high school Kagami Taiga comes back from America two years earlier and beats them all up. They learn what it means to be powerless and therefore, human.

In this world, everyone’s too busy trying to unfuck themselves to fuck anyone else over. Kuroko meets Akashi in kindergarten and he teaches him how to catch people’s attention by breaking things that matter to them, then vanishes down the expensive, well-funded path of private education. No one comes close enough to Kuroko to show him where his shadow is so he never learns where to look for it. By the time Kagami comes back from America, there’s nothing left for him to salvage anymore. It’s not that Kuroko can’t save himself; he doesn’t even know that it’s an option for most of his life. He has always been easy to miss. It’s really not his fault.

Adults are selfish creatures. When their ancestors invented the light bulb they wanted a way to avoid getting their fingers burned in the hot melting darkness. The GPS was created for war. Ryouta bumps into Kuroko again after high school and when he says _hey, we went to the same high school didn’t we,_ he’s thinking about taking him home and eating his heart, not salvation. It’s selfish and self-centered and it brings them together despite everything. Maybe Ryouta’s all right with being a cruel, fucked up person after all. They all have to have cheated at least once to make it this far.

::

On the evening before Kuroko’s twenty-eighth birthday he wanders into the living room, which smells permanently of stale cigarettes, and joins Ryouta on the couch. “Do you remember,” he begins conversationally, “when we met in high school? I never mentioned it to you, but I was actually very pleased when you spoke to me.”

Ryouta is lying like a tastefully-rendered Mona Lisa across the length of the couch and Kuroko is sitting in front of his knees. He lifts his head off the armrest for a moment. “Why didn’t you mention it?”

“I was not sure if you knew who I was.”

“Of course I did, everyone knew who you were.”

“Everyone thought I could see ghosts.”

“That’s true.” Ryouta draws his knees back towards himself and sits up properly. “That sucks. If I had been your friend, I wouldn’t have let you near the rabbits.”

At this, Kuroko’s expression turns thoughtful. “Did you know it takes approximately two hundred apple seeds to kill a full-grown adult?” He tugs absently at a stray thread from the couch. “I wanted to see what the rabbits would do in our place. They looked very innocent.”

“You’re a fucked up person, Kuroko.”

Kuroko laughs. It is nothing like the cold, manic laughter of villains in Hollywood movies or evil stepmothers in weeknight drama serials that Ryouta is familiar with. It is rather human. “I have always liked that aspect of you,” he says, covering his smile with the back of his hand. Ryouta doesn’t breathe.

“What about the rest?”

“Hm?”

“Of me. What about everything else?”

Kuroko tilts his head to one side gently. “Are you willing to show me that much?”

Ryouta doesn't breathe.

::

In the morning there’s a bruise on his hip and his left shoulder blade and Kuroko has escaped to the balcony for a smoke. Remind me why I had sex with you again, Ryouta says, dodging the glowing tip of his cigarette and kissing his jaw. You like me, Kuroko shrugs. The morning is wet and gloomy and sticks to the back of his ears like the words of forgotten gods. The hands of heaven have retreated back into the clouds. Kuroko’s skin is not cold, but not quite warm, either.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i thought to myself one day "what if kuroko didn't go to teikou". and then i said what if kagami came back in his third year of high school instead of his first. what if kise stayed in tokyo. what if akashi was still rich and aomine was aomine somewhere else. if the generation of miracles didn't get together maybe they wouldn't fuck each other over so badly a la murasakibara-incited chain reaction of destruction, but guess not. these folks are fun. lately i've been working on research papers and watching kazetsuyo. life's all right. hope your life's all right too  
> thank you for reading! if you liked it please feel free to kudo, comment, bookmark, etc
> 
> have a good one


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